Table of Contents
Discover, Diagnose, Design and Deliver.
In his book, Mastering The Complex Sale, Jeff Thull, encourages anyone involved in sales and marketing to use the four Ds.
Moving towards a common goal #
Their use switches sales engagement away from being adversarial towards being a guided decision process where sales people and clients work together towards a common goal – delivery of the highest value solution to the client’s challenges.
Thull highlights 5 main points:
- Get beyond selling to managing decisions. It’s much more preferable to set aside confrontational processes and replacing them with a collaborative decision process, provided by the sales professional.
- Get beyond problem solving to facilitating change. Change, along with all the associated risks, is the key issue faced by clients. We need to help clients understand, prepare for and navigate the change required, to ensure the successful implementation of their solution, achieve the value they are expecting and measure the value they have achieved.
- Get beyond meeting needs to managing expectations. Just because we see a need does not mean that our customers see it or understand it as clearly as we do and will do something about it. Clarifying and quantifying the value of our solution according to our clients’ performance measures and with a number our clients believe will give them the confidence to invest in our solutions.
- Get beyond transactions to managing relationships. In the rush to close deals, we too often forget the human factor and miss the opportunity of creating mutually beneficial relationships.
- Get beyond rote talking points and “value messages” to rich, interactive conversations. This is vital in our search for clarity and our switch to deeper thinking when resolving the challenges faced by our clients.
Human Element #
Every aspect of what we do comes down to the human element and being human.
Lead generation + relationship building = sales progress
Thank you for reading.
